Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 8;17(6):e0269652. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269652. eCollection 2022.
Understanding insincere language (sarcasm and teasing) is a fundamental part of communication and crucial for maintaining social relationships. This can be a challenging task for cochlear implant (CIs) users who receive degraded suprasegmental information important for perceiving a speaker's attitude. We measured the perception of speaker sincerity (literal positive, literal negative, sarcasm, and teasing) in 16 adults with CIs using an established video inventory. Participants were presented with audio-only and audio-visual social interactions between two people with and without supporting verbal context. They were instructed to describe the content of the conversation and answer whether the speakers meant what they said. Results showed that subjects could not always identify speaker sincerity, even when the content of the conversation was perfectly understood. This deficit was greater for perceiving insincere relative to sincere utterances. Performance improved when additional visual cues or verbal context cues were provided. Subjects who were better at perceiving the content of the interactions in the audio-only condition benefited more from having additional visual cues for judging the speaker's sincerity, suggesting that the two modalities compete for cognitive recourses. Perception of content also did not correlate with perception of speaker sincerity, suggesting that what was said vs. how it was said were perceived using unrelated segmental versus suprasegmental cues. Our results further showed that subjects who had access to lower-order resolved harmonic information provided by hearing aids in the contralateral ear identified speaker sincerity better than those who used implants alone. These results suggest that measuring speech recognition alone in CI users does not fully describe the outcome. Our findings stress the importance of measuring social communication functions in people with CIs.
理解不真诚的语言（讽刺和调侃）是交流的基本组成部分，对维持社会关系至关重要。对于使用人工耳蜗（CIs）的人来说，这是一项具有挑战性的任务，因为他们接收到的超音段信息会降级，而这些信息对于感知说话者的态度很重要。我们使用已建立的视频清单，测量了 16 名 CIs 使用者对说话者真诚度（字面肯定、字面否定、讽刺、调侃）的感知。参与者观看了两个人之间只有音频和视听的社会互动，参与者要描述对话的内容并回答说话者是否是在说真心话。结果表明，即使对话的内容完全被理解，受试者也不能总是识别说话者的真诚度。与识别真诚的话语相比，他们更难识别不真诚的话语。当提供更多的视觉线索或口头语境线索时，表现会有所提高。在只有音频的条件下，更善于感知互动内容的受试者从判断说话者真诚度时增加更多视觉线索中受益更多，这表明两种模态争夺认知资源。对内容的感知也与对说话者真诚度的感知没有相关性，这表明说话的内容和说话的方式是使用不相关的音段和超音段线索来感知的。我们的结果还表明，那些在对侧耳朵中使用助听器获得低阶解析谐波信息的受试者比那些单独使用植入物的受试者能更好地识别说话者的真诚度。这些结果表明，仅在 CIs 用户中测量语音识别并不能完全描述结果。我们的研究结果强调了在 CIs 用户中测量社交沟通功能的重要性。
